Salesforce.com Journal

Convio announced that Convio Common Ground CRM, the company’s innovative software that allows nonprofits to manage all the relationships needed to fulfill their mission, has been named a finalist in the Force.com Forty Innovation Showcase held by salesforce.com. Easy to buy, own and maintain, more than 130 charities have chosen Common Ground to replace their traditional donor database since being introduced late last year. In all, more than 1,200 seats have been licensed making it one of the fastest growing software applications in the nonprofit sector.

As developers build on Force.com, salesforce.com’s custom application development platform, new kinds of innovative applications are being built every day. Judged on their ability to solve a real business challenge, visual design and level of customer adoption, the Force.com Forty recognizes the best applications from the salesforce.com partner community. The top overall application(s) will be announced at Dreamforce 2009, salesforce.com’s user and developer conference, held November 17-20, 2009 in San Francisco.

“Convio Common Ground is changing the rules and expectations nonprofit professionals have for what their donor database should and can do to help them manage relationships, programs and their mission,” said Gene Austin, chief executive officer, Convio. “In less than a year, we have helped clients leverage the Force.com platform to deliver an application that is solving the many pain points and limitations of traditional donor databases. We’ve just scratched the surface of what is possible on the Force.com platform.”

Designed to function as more than a donor database, Common Ground breaks down the disparate “silos” of data by consolidating all spreadsheets, address books, database systems and lists into a single solution. Using Common Ground, nonprofit organizations can now not only manage relationships with all constituent types including, volunteers, donors and partners, they can also manage events, track donations and gifts received and organize upcoming tasks and calendar dates through integration with Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Notes and Google Apps. With Common Ground organizations can customize the software to fit business processes and the way nonprofits work rather than change the organization’s procedures to fit the software.

Since it’s delivered in the cloud, Common Ground users can avoid the costs and complexity of upgrades of traditional software. Additionally, being built and delivered on the Force.com platform, Common Ground easily integrates with other systems, including Convio’s online fundraising, marketing and advocacy suite, Facebook, Twitter and the nearly 1,000 applications found on the salesforce.com AppExchange. Common Ground allows nonprofits to focus on their mission, fundraising, and communications results instead of managing and maintaining software and technology infrastructure.

“Customers look to salesforce.com partners like Convio to help realize nonprofit success,” said Kendall Collins, chief marketing officer, salesforce.com. “With solutions such as what Convio demonstrated during Force.com Forty, nonprofit organizations will have access to innovative enterprise applications that help them run their organizations better. It’s this unique value that becomes apparent during the Force.com Forty competition.”

Learn more and see demonstrations of Convio Common Ground at Convio Summit 2009, November 16-18 in Austin, TX and at Dreamforce ‘09, booth #131 in San Francisco, Nov. 17-20, 2009.